Once you’ve mastered the basics of putting yourself into light trance using the technique I showed you in the first two articles of this series on how to learn self-hypnosis you can start doing some really useful exercises. Soon you’ll be an expert on how to hypnotize yourself.

By now everyone knows how powerful positive affirmations and visualising your success is. Yet for so many people it doesn’t seem to work. First of all don’t doubt for a moment that mentally rehearsing successful behaviour works. For example neuro-scientists have found that the parts of our brain we use to act out real behaviour is exactly the same as the parts that we use when we imagine that behaviour, or see others doing it. So it has a real scientific basis.

The reason why a lot of people can’t get positive visualisations to work for them is because of two reasons. The first is that their current beliefs and behaviours are ingrained into their neurology to the extent that any visualisation of new beliefs and behaviours is rejected by their minds. The second is that humans possess something called the critical factor. This is a part of your mind that distinguishes between what it thinks is realistic and possible and things that are not. Whether the critical factor is correct in these assessments is irrelevant, it does its job in a way it sees fit to.

Hypnosis is the ideal tool to bypass the critical factor and to momentarily suspend your habitual beliefs and behaviour which means that when you are in a hypnotic trance… anything goes.

So your exercise for the next time you put yourself into a hypnotic trance (See: How to learn Self-Hypnisis: Exercise 1) is to visualise yourself doing the behaviour you think you need to do in order to reach your goals. So if you want to one day retire on a tropical island imagine yourself researching a new business idea, finding partners to work with and working efficiently and productively to make the business a success. The key is to not focus on the end goal (that would just be day-dreaming) but on the journey. You can either see yourself doing this from outside or experience it through your own eyes whatever feels best to you.

This is the best way to use positive visualisations and by learning how to do self-hypnosis you’ll be setting yourself up to make the most of this powerful tool. Learning how to hypnotize yourself is one of the most important things you can do to get ahead so I advise you keep practising and keep exploring.